A new start after 60: I realised I had autism – and suddenly my life made sense. I have never been so happyNEWS | 13 October 2025When she was 39, Cathleen Caffrey saw a brochure at her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It showed people who’d got sober in their 70s, talking about “how wonderful their lives were. That gave me a hope that I hung on to for a long time,” she says. Caffrey turned 80 this year, and is decades into her sobriety, but only now feels at peace with herself.
All her life, Caffrey had assumed she was “a bad person, not a lovable person, not a likable person”. Her parents separated when she was 10, and “at that point, some voice in me said, ‘Nothing’s ever gonna work.’”
She grew up in California, and at school she was bright, but “very shy … I would read during recess. Or I would play hopscotch by myself.”
After university, she tried graduate school, and hated it. She had a string of jobs – filing computer keypunch cards, as an administrative assistant, a data-processor, technical writing and editing, checking hospital databases for duplicate records – but couldn’t build a career. “ I just did not know how to do the schmoozing and teamwork. I was stuck in this mindset of, ‘There’s something wrong with me.’ And I just couldn’t break out of that.”
The same pattern played out in relationships. “I was never able to find a relationship that worked for me.” They didn’t last, or they became obsessive – “another kind of addiction … And it was very painful having those fall apart over and over,” she says. “I spent quite a few years thinking I looked like the Elephant Man.”
Caffrey didn’t start drinking till she was 21, and then it became problematic only gradually. She went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in her 30s and has “been sober for 42 years”, but experienced depression for decades.
After retiring with repetitive strain injuries in her mid-50s, she says, “I must have spent 10 or 12 hours a day lying on my back watching television. “I kept thinking, ‘I can’t do anything.’”
Some members of Caffrey’s wider family had been diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And when the Covid pandemic hit, she had “a chance to think” and began to explore online some of the feelings that had run through her life from childhood.
“One day, the word ‘autism’ caught my eye, and I found this whole world of videos of people describing the problems they’d had as very young kids. Never feeling they belonged, never feeling as if they fit in, having a great deal of difficulty making friends. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is me. This is me to a T.’”
Caffrey can’t afford to explore a formal diagnosis, but she now identifies as autistic. Reaching an understanding of herself has been transformational. “It was such an incredible relief to find out that what I’d always assumed was me being a bad person was just me not having understood the way I related to people.”
Caffrey lives in a mobile home park for senior citizens in Santa Rosa, California, where there is an active social community. She goes to philosophy discussion groups and the odd potluck dinner, while her rescue dog, Petunia, has a habit of approaching people with wagging tail, which “helps a lot” with interactions. “I’m more or less quietly happy a lot of the time now,” Caffrey says.
When she turned 80 in July, her brother and his partner wanted to throw a party for her. “I thought, ‘What the hell?’”
She invited people from the philosophy group and people she says hello to when she is walking Petunia. “And 60 people came! In my whole life, I would have figured the most who would ever come to a party for me would be 10 people. I just couldn’t believe it. It was the most amazing experience of my life,” she says. They all seemed to be happy to see me.”
In her ninth decade, Caffrey has found contentment. “I’m no longer driven by wanting money, a specific relationship, or acknowledgment for achievements. I don’t feel as if I’m being driven by anything except my own wish to feel OK about my life, and to do the best I can for my dog and my family and myself. And that feels very peaceful to me.”Author: Paula Cocozza. Source
